Our favourite Australian photos of 2015 – in pictures

Our favourite Australian photos of 2015 – in pictures

We’ve received more than a quarter of a million photographs relating to Australia over the past 12 months – and we’ve shot and seen plenty more on our travels. Here are some of the most memorable, newsworthy, creative and talked-about images from professional and amateur photographers alike

A portrait of Scarlett, the photographer Nina O’Brien’s daughter, from a series called Domestic Theatrics. O’Brien describes the series as a ‘private porthole’ chronicling ‘the myriad of keenly felt emotions that are played out on a daily basis’ and as ‘photos never destined for the family album’.

A PR gaffe by the prime minister’s team as Tony Abbott walks past a ‘Reject’ sign on his way to visit a butcher’s shop in Canberra on 4 June. By September the PM would indeed be rejected – by his own party – in a vote brought about by Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership challenge.

Two huge storm cells – Cyclone Lam in the Arafura Sea and Cyclone Marcia off the east coast of Queensland – seen heading towards Australia in February. Cyclone Marcia was a category five storm which caused at least $750m worth of damage.

A portrait of Sydney lawyer Adam Houda, who has represented alleged terrorist suspects and who counted Sydney siege gunman Man Haron Monis as a client. Houda is seen in his 1950 Chevy in an image created by Nic Walker for Fairfax’s Good Weekend. It won the portrait category at the 2015 Walkley awards.

‘Enter’ by Justine Varga, a finalist in the 2015 Bowness Photography Prize. The image is in fact a piece of film which was used as a doormat, thereby exposing it both to light and to physical contact. In her artist’s statement she detailed how it had been exposed for three months. ‘It is a palimpsest for a moving image as layers of sediment; a photographic remembrance that shifts the decisive moment, stretches it out and collapses it again,’ she said.